Teams that Lead: A Matter of Market Strategy, Leadership Skills and Executive Strength

Canadian Psychology, Nov 2003 by Tivendell, John

THERESA J. B. KLINE Teams that Lead: A Matter of Market Strategy, Leadership Skills and Executive Strength Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003, 221 pages (ISBN 0-8058-4237-3, US$59.95 Cloth ISBN 0-8058-4542-9 US$24.50 Paperback) Reviewed by JOHN TIVENDELL

Teams are an increasingly important structure in many organizations as they promise to simplify processes, enhance participation, and add a competitive advantage. They have not always yielded those benefits. However, if only because of their popularity, insight into the factors and processes that contribute to their effectiveness is important to both academics and managers. Using teams to make decisions and solve problems is in part based on the arguable idea that pooling the knowledge and resources of many will be more effective than relying on the ability of any one leader. Most popular consultants today say that teams represent a powerful organizational tool and refer to concepts such as empowerment, self-management, and high-performance teams.

Teams and small work groups have existed since the very first military and religious organizations. However, especially over the last two generations, oodles of pertinent scientific literature has become available, from the early works of Argyle, Bales, and Fiedler to today's Campion, Guzzo, and Wall. We know that to be effective teams must survive, care for their members, and adapt to a changing environment but we know little about specific characteristics of the team, of the tasks, and of the situation that differentiate between successful and unsuccessful teams. Professor Kline thinks that putting together a leadership perspective and a market strategy perspective will tell us that.

The book links a not uncommon three-type taxonomy of market environments, in this case touted by consultant gurus Tracey and Weirsema, to her own three-type taxonomy of leadership styles, and then explores this model's application to a specific type of work group, the top management team. Although the author is an applied psychologist, a scientist, her book relies heavily on a professional management type literature. Despite the paucity of scientific literature, the book presents its model and arguments in an interesting, systems-oriented fashion.

As the title suggests, the book is divided into three parts, prefaced by a brief introductory chapter and followed by a brief concluding chapter. In her first chapter, Professor Kline reminds us that many organizations, in seeking to eliminate much of their middle management whilst nevertheless wishing to adopt quality control practices and realizing "a nouveau" the importance of employee commitment, have sought to adopt a team approach. She then notes that in the process the team leadership variable "keeps cropping up" and thus adds it to the equation.

Next, in Part I per se, the author leads us directly to Tracey and Weirsema's three options or market strategies. Essentially, these are derived from Michael Porter's alternatives, to choose a product or a customer focus, and from the traditional management focus on developing efficient processes. This is half of her two-concept model. As in each of the book's three parts, there is also a section in which the author reviews some literature underlying what is being discussed. However, in each case this review is incomplete and usually unimpressive. This will certainly irk those with academic pretensions who are looking for underlying scientific theories, valid measures, and references to empirical data testing these concepts. However, given a target audience of professionals who are probably familiar with many of these writings, this may not be a bad approach. Finally, there are two things in this first part that actually got me to like this book: the implementation of each focus or market strategy in terms of a set of relevant elements, which I could eventually represent in the form of a grid, and her use of a system's approach to identify and define these elements.

That is, in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 Professor Kline explores the potential implementation of each of these three market strategies. To do so she identified a number of elements which, to someone familiar with closed systems (do not look to Katz and Kahn circa 1966 but rather to researchers like Roy Payne and Tom Singleton), are based on such a taxonomy. That is, she explores the possible implementation of each focus in terms the organization's objectives (read goals and chosen focus), its structure (whether the organization is vertical or horizontal, Weberian or Humanistic, etc.), its management style, its organizational climate, the characteristics of its members, the characteristics of its tasks (read training), and finally the identification of appropriate criterion to evaluate its outcomes. The results could have been represented by a 3 x 7 grid, which Professor Kline must have used to write these chapters and to present this first part of her model, which now goes well beyond the Tracey and Wiersema contribution. Once I uncovered this grid I was also able to adjust to her vocabulary: The market strategy section deals with the organization's objectives, the leadership section deals with allocation, and the executive team section deals with actions.